http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | It's funny that the abbreviation for the United Nations is U.N. It always makes me think of negatives. Unhelpful. Unrealistic. Unproductive. Unhappy.

This has been an especially bittersweet summer for the United Nations. I'm talking about not only its monthlong paralysis while war between Israel and Hezbollah has devastated Lebanese and Israeli cities, but also the manifest impotence of its peacekeeping force in Lebanon, four members of which were killed July 25 by Israeli forces. Despite all this, most people still tend to assume that the U.N. is the best place to look for a solution to this latest crisis in the Middle East. Indeed, on Friday, U.N. Security Council members agreed to a resolution aimed at stopping the fighting.

But who seriously expects the United Nations to prevent Al Qaeda (or its latest imitator) from trying to blow up passenger planes in the air? Those who dreamed up the "Lockerbie-meets-9/11" bomb plot clearly did intend "mass murder on an unimaginable scale." All the U.N. has to offer in response is yada, yada, yada on an unimaginable scale.

I had a look at the U.N. website Friday to see how the "international community" was reacting to the transatlantic horror that might have been. It didn't take long to locate a promising page titled "U.N. Action Against Terrorism." Clicking on "Latest Developments" took me to Secretary-General Kofi Annan's "Recommendations for Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy." Underneath was a stirring condemnation of "terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, committed by whomever, wherever and for whatever purposes," taken from Annan's report, "Uniting Against Terrorism," published in April.

But my heart sank as I plowed through the report. By the time I got to Chapter VI  "Defending human rights in the context of terrorism and counter-terrorism"  I was comatose. In his new book, "The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations," the British-born Yale historian Paul Kennedy shows just why the U.N. excels at what Churchill called jaw-jaw, but does less well at stopping war-war. Kennedy takes his title from Tennyson's poem "Locksley Hall," in which the poet "dipt into the future" and imagined a time when "the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd / In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world."

President Truman frequently quoted Tennyson's lines at the time of the U.N.'s founding conference in 1945, in an effort to persuade his wavering countrymen not to repudiate the idea of collective security (as they had in the 1920s). Yet it was not quite a "Parliament of man" that emerged  more a parliament of nation-states, strictly subordinated to an executive committee of five past or present empires: the permanent members of the Security Council.

Most advocates of U.N. reform tend to focus on the considerable power of those five powers. Why, they ask, should Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States each enjoy the privilege of vetoing resolutions they do not like the look of? Why should China have a seat, but not India  simply because India was still part of Britain's empire in 1945, whereas no one in Washington expected the Communists to take over China just four years later? Those who make this point are almost as misguided as those reactionary Republicans who regard the United Nations as an irritant rather than an asset to the U.S., forgetting altogether how much the U.S. has benefited from U.N. legitimization in previous conflicts, such as the Korean War and the Gulf War.

I agree with the thrust of Kennedy's argument that a postwar world without the United Nations  or a world with an institution more like the much weaker League of Nations  would have been an even less peaceful world. You only need to run through the list of ongoing U.N. peacekeeping missions to realize just how many conflicts it has helped to dampen down, if not to end.

There are currently 18 United Nations peacekeeping operations underway, out of a total of 60 in the entire post-1945 period. Would an enlarged or otherwise modified Security Council authorize more  or more effective  peacekeeping operations? Would it have acted sooner or more successfully in recent genocidal wars such as those fought in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s? It seems unlikely.

If anything, the unrepresentative composition of the Security Council increases the chances that its members will agree, especially now that the Cold War is over. Today, the weakness of the United Nations lies elsewhere. It lies in precisely the fact that the General Assembly represents all (or nearly all) of the world's nation-states, from the vast and ancient to the tiny and new. That not only leads to the overrepresentation of peoples with relatively high levels of political fragmentation (such as the Arabs), it also leads to the overrepresentation of nation-states, per se.

In Tennyson's imagined Parliament of man, "the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe." In the same way, the U.N. is designed to deal with "fretful" states that break international law. Even if it often does so fitfully (as with Iran's nuclear weapons program), the mechanisms are there. But Hezbollah is not a state but, at best, a state within a state. And Al Qaeda is a loose network that operates within many states. It is far from clear  least of all from Annan's report  what role the U.N. should play in combating such malignant "non-state actors," other than to spawn committees and churn out more reports.

Terrorist organizations thrive precisely where states are weak. And those weak states are as well represented in the U.N. General Assembly as the strong states against whom the terrorists direct their attacks. This is precisely why calls for the creation of a U.N. intelligence service or a U.N. standing army (which Kennedy supports) are just as unrealistic as Tennyson's youthful vision: "And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law."

"Chaos, Cosmos! Cosmos, Chaos!" exclaimed an older, wiser Tennyson in "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After." "Who can tell how all will end?" That is the question no one can answer about the incurably disunited world we live in.

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Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University. He is the author of "Empire" (Basic Books, 2003) and "Colossus" (Penguin, 2004).
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